Milvus

What is Milvus?

Vector database for RAG and semantic search that runs on a laptop, a server or a Kubernetes cluster.

Who is Milvus best for?

Milvus is best for AI engineers who need vector search over billions of embeddings on their own servers.

• RAG and semantic search

  Milvus stores embeddings next to integers, strings and JSON fields, so a search can filter on metadata in the same query.

• Keyword plus vector search

  BM25 full text search and sparse embeddings such as SPLADE sit beside dense vectors, so hybrid search needs no second engine.

• Prototypes that grow

  Milvus Lite runs in a notebook after a pip install, and the same client code later points at a Standalone server or a cluster.

• Very large collections

  Distributed mode splits compute from storage on Kubernetes and scales out to tens of billions of vectors.

How much does Milvus cost?

Milvus is free to self-host under Apache 2.0; Zilliz Cloud, the managed version, has a free tier with 5 GB of storage, pay-as-you-go serverless clusters and dedicated clusters from $126 a month.

Zilliz Cloud is the fully managed Milvus from Zilliz, the project's main contributor. Business Critical (HIPAA-eligible, customer-managed keys, global clusters) and bring-your-own-cloud deployments are priced on request. Dedicated cluster capacity starts at $63 per million vectors a month on performance-optimized nodes, $16 on capacity-optimized and $5 on tiered storage, for 768-dimension vectors. Full pricing on zilliz.com. We checked these prices on 8 Nov 2026.

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Is Milvus open source?

Yes. Milvus's code is public under the Apache 2.0 licence, so you can run it on your own server.

Host it on a serverHostinger, Railway, Elestio and Akamai Cloud set it up on a server for you with a one-click install.

Hosting with

What are the best Milvus alternatives?

Milvus is an open source alternative to Pinecone. Qdrant, Supavec, Deeplake and HelixDB do the same job and are open source too.

PineconeFree

Managed vector database for search, RAG and agents.

QdrantOpen Source

Open-source vector search with real-time indexing.

SupavecOpen Source

Open-source RAG for your own data.

DeeplakeOpen Source

Database for AI data that keeps vectors with images, video and text, plus search and versioning.

HelixDBOpen Source

Graph database with built-in vector and full-text search, made for AI agent memory and retrieval.

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